Neda Agha-Soltan

Courtesy Caspian Makan/Associated Press

Updated: June 22, 2009

Neda Agha-Soltan was a 26-year-old Iranian woman who was shot to death on a Tehran street in the unrest that followed the country's disputed election in June 2009. Although Ms. Agha-Soltan, whom her relatives described as unpolitical, was killed on a quiet street and was not participating in any political rally when she was shot, she became an instant symbol of the anti-government movement when a video of her death was shared on social networking sites.

Only scraps of information are known about Ms. Agha-Soltan. Her friends and relatives were mostly afraid to speak, and the government broke up public attempts to mourn her. She studied philosophy and took underground singing lessons - women are barred from singing publicly in Iran. Her name means voice in Persian, and many are now calling her the voice of Iran.

Her fiancé, Caspian Makan, contributed to a Persian Wikipedia entry. He said she never supported any particular presidential candidate. "She wanted freedom, freedom for everybody," the entry read.

Her singing instructor, Hamid Panahi, offered a glimpse of her last moments.

He said the two of them had attempted to join a rally and decided to head home after being caught in a clash with club-wielding forces in central Tehran. The car was hot and they decided to step out for some fresh air. "We heard one gunshot, and the bullet came and hit Neda right in the chest," he said. The shot was fired from the rooftop of a private house across the street, perhaps by a sniper, he said. On a Facebook posting along with the video, an anonymous doctor said he tried to save her but failed because the bullet hit her heart. "It burned me," she said before she died.

Shortly after Ms. Agha-Soltan died, the man whose 40-second video of her death has ricocheted around the world made a somber calculation in what has become the cat-and-mouse game of evading Iran's censors. He knew that the government had been blocking Web sites like YouTube and Facebook. Trying to send the video there could have exposed him and his family.

Instead, he e-mailed the two-megabyte video to a nearby friend, who quickly forwarded it to the Voice of America, the newspaper The Guardian in London and five online friends in Europe, with a message that read, "Please let the world know." It was one of those friends, an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands, who posted it on Facebook, weeping as he did so, he recalled.

Copies of the video, as well as a shorter one shot by another witness, spread almost instantly to YouTube and were televised within hours by CNN. Despite a prolonged effort by Iran's government to keep a media lid on the violent events unfolding on the streets, Ms. Agha-Soltan was transformed on the Web from a nameless victim into an icon of the Iranian protest movement.

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